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Lactic acid bacteria
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Bacteria that produce lactic acid (and often acetic acid) in sourdough, cheese, and other fermented foods.
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Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) sour dough and milk. They produce lactic acid and, in heterofermentative species, often acetic acid and carbon dioxide as well. That Acidity flavors food and makes the habitat harder for some competitors.
In a Sourdough starter LAB share flour paste with Wild yeast. In cheese they are often added as Cheese cultures. Cabbage and cucumber brines are Lacto-fermentation. Wine’s main alcoholic ferment is yeast; Malolactic fermentation is a later bacterial story.
The lactic/acetic balance in bread depends on temperature, hydration, and flour — not on a city’s name alone 1. Fructilactobacillus sanfranciscensis (formerly Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis) was isolated from San Francisco bakery doughs in 1971 as a maltose-loving heterofermenter 2 and renamed in the 2020 Lactobacillus split 3. It is a sourdough specialist, not a municipal monopoly. History and the geographic myth: San Francisco sourdough.
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Cited in this article
- The Taste of Bread — Raymond Calvel. Aspen Publishers. 2001. ISBN 978-0-8342-1646-4 — English edition of Calvel's technical account of French bread. The link is a WorldCat catalog record for the print edition; it is not a public full-text copy.
- Microorganisms of the San Francisco Sour Dough Bread Process. II. Isolation and Characterization of Undescribed Bacterial Species Responsible for the Souring Activity — Leo Kline, T. F. Sugihara. Applied Microbiology. 1971 — USDA Western Regional Research Laboratory isolation of the heterofermentative souring bacterium from San Francisco sourdough. Type-strain work later named Lactobacillus sanfrancisco / L. sanfranciscensis.. DOI 10.1128/am.21.3.459-465.1971 Web version
- A taxonomic note on the genus Lactobacillus: Description of 23 novel genera, emended description of the genus Lactobacillus Beijerinck 1901, and union of Lactobacillaceae and Leuconostocaceae — Jinshui Zheng, Stijn Wittouck, Elisa Salvetti, Charles M. A. P. Franz, Hugh M. B. Harris, Paola Mattarelli, Paul W. O'Toole, Bernard Pot, Peter Vandamme, Jens Walter, Koichi Watanabe, Sander Wuyts, Giovanna E. Felis, Michael G. Gänzle, Sarah Lebeer. International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology. 2020 — Valid publication of Fructilactobacillus sanfranciscensis comb. nov. (basonym Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis).. DOI 10.1099/ijsem.0.004107
Updated 2026-08-25. gg:topic:lactic-acid-bacteria · CC BY 4.0
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